gfunkdave

Well, after three months I finally got the notification that Win10 was ready. Upgrading now!

piper28

I still tend to feel there's little compelling reason to upgrade a machine that's running windows 7 to windows 10. In general, that machine is going to be old enough that any of the new technology benefits wouldn't really apply. And Windows 7 in general works well enough and is mature enough that it's a pretty safe product to be on. And the argument that the upgrade is free now and may not be in the future isn't one I'd consider to be all that important. Not the least of which, Win 7 still has about 4.5 years of support from microsoft left. And I fully expect there will still be a large installed base of machines running windows 7 when that time period ends (which will probably cause a lot of the same issues that end of xp support did).

Now, from windows 8? To me there's definitely more compelling reasons to do that, although that said, i haven't bothered to upgrade my home laptop yet. That said, windows 8 with classic shell solves a lot of the problems it had.

Then again, I tend to believe that upgrading for upgrading's sake is frequently a questionable path. While lots of people have had great success doing it, I know I've had a couple of machines personally (and I haven't done a huge number) where things haven't necessarily been straight forward. (The newest machines I've done have had the least problems, it's machines that are a few years old that I've had the most difficulty.)

MaxBuck

You've captured my concerns pretty well here. I'm quite aware that when I get my next new laptop (likely a year or two away), it's likely to run W10, and I'm resigned to learn all the new tips and tricks and shortcuts when that happens. But updating to W10 on my current device that runs W7 Pro 64 just fine? No reason to do that at all, regardless of the $0 price.

Not everything that's free is worth having. Most of the alcohol served at Embassy Suites falls into the category of free stuff I want no part of.

superangrypenguin

W10 is easier to run than W7. You'd be eeking out minor performance gains as a result.

BigLar

I tend to sgree with you - I see Windows 10 as primarily intended to make Microsoft's life easier, not necessarily mine. Plus, they apparently have a lot of stuff built in (admittedly optional) that gathers quite a bit on information on you and your habits so they, or their partners, can sell you stuff.
None of those things is of any concern to me. I'm not sure I know what HiDPI screens are, nor really what Thunderbolt is. I'm doing fine at the present with USB 2.0, and I can't imagine myself using a touch screen or rotation/accelerometer sensors on a laptop (I don't have either a tablet or even a smartphone and I consider myself as leading a full and enjoyable life, thank you very much ).

I don't evaluate laptops for a living, nor do I maintain them. The only time I might need/be concerned about them is if the job required it, and I would expect my employer to supply the appropriate hardware/software, and their IT department to maintain it.

I have downloaded Win 10 on one machine, and I will probably load a couple more as time passes. But since I pretty much know where everything is on Win 7, I have the human tendency to be more concerned with getting stuff done, so rassling the learning hill with Win 10 tends to take a back seat.

-signed, Ned Ludd

cubbie

Any opinions on how long a factory reset of Windows 10 on a 1-Tb drive should take? It's been 3 hours so far.

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Updated to add: it took about 4.5 hrs to get past the 99% screen and move on to other Windows 10 reinstall steps. Mods, feel free to delete this post and my previous post if you see fit, but I thought the 4.5 hours might be useful info for others.

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Mr Mister came home the other day with a new laptop with Windows 10 that he bought for me from Costco. Overall, it's great, except that it was used as a floor model and thus configured by someone at Costco. After trying to change the name of the User directory from that person's name to mine, I wound up with a perpetually spinning Welcome screen and unable to boot into safe mode to undo what I'd done.

Costco concierge technical support to the rescue! They were great. They suggested doing a factory reset to wipe out all of Costco Employee's user settings and starting from scratch, which is fine with me because I'd hardly installed anything on it so far. What I did was a full reset with no saving of files, including wiping the whole drive or whatever that option was called.

Ms. Technical Concierge warned me that the resetting process could stick at 99% for quite a long time and that I should just not touch it and let it take as long as it takes, which is okay too; I'm off to bed in a while and don't care if it takes all night.

Just curious, though, does 3 hrs so far seem odd? Is it a function of the hard drive size (1 Tb)? The computer is an Inspiron 15 with an intel core 15 processor and 12 Gb of RAM.

If it's still at 99% when I wake up in the morning, I will be worried.

DenverBrian

It probably won't be, but it might. If you ask it to "wipe" data, it's doing multiple write passes to ensure that all the data is truly erased - much more intense and time-consuming than simply "deleting" the files (which, in actuality, only marks the files as "erased," making them recoverable pretty easily).

If it's a typical full security wipe, the deleted files will be written over with random data at least seven times. So that could indeed take several hours.

nkedel

For future reference, this is a bad idea on multiple levels, and while a reset is the best thing to do anyway (or on an older version than 8, a clean reinstall) on a machine other people have used, if that's not practical, never re-use a user account -- just create a new one for yourself, then erase the original.

4 1/2 hours sounds really slow; I'm used to SSDs on modern systems (literally none of my machines have a rotating disk for the OS drive anymore) but even allowing for "disks are many times slower" that sounds terribly slow.

OTOH, I have never done the full reset deleting files as well -- I wonder if Windows actually does a wipe on the empty space of the drive, rather than just deleting the files? A full wipe zeroing out a consumer-grade 1TB hard drive is going to be somewhere around 3 hours. (Or as DenverBrian suggests, it could be doing a multi-pass wipe on the files it's deleting; 4 1/2 hours might be enough to do a two pass wipe on all the empty space on a 1TB drive, but definitely not a full military grade wipe.)

Tiki

I've applied for the invitation and am still waiting. In the meanwhile, I was wondering what happens if the tablet I plan to upgrade from Win 8.1 is usually switched off so it can't download in the background? Will it wake the tablet up from being switched off?

Also, does Win 10 interfere with Office 2013 Home & Student? I don't want that Office 365 subscription service and even the free trials can become a pita if they interfere with your existing installation. I had to call the support line and they walked me through deleting the 365 files, still a pita!

superangrypenguin

This is not a worry.

MaxBuck

I turn on my (W7) computer and start working. Can't get any easier than that.

nkedel

It won't wake up, but it also won't do the background download while off.

There's really no purpose to the "invitation" now that it's out officially if you have a decent internet connection; it was useful for pre-loading things. These days, if you want it on a given machine, just download the relatively small Media Creation tool from Microsoft and run the "upgrade this machine" option.

If you're on a slower/shared internet line which can't do a big download all at once, waiting for the slower background download may still make sense.

pseudoswede

My post was tongue-in-cheek because the thread really fell off the rails (IMO) with discussions about corporate images and stuff.

Kristem

I upgraded and i know that was horrible idea yet. It is not as stable as it should be. And not all programs work after upgrade. But i will give it a try

piper28

Key word in there is minor. I've seen no evidence of performance gains that are at all significant, and I think realistically for what the "average" person uses a computer for, they'd never notice a difference.